The Monster of the Lagoon
, by George F. Worts.
Starmont Facsimile Fiction
#14. viii+145 p. ISBN 1-55742-243-5 cloth $20.95; ISBN 1-55742-242-7 paper $10.95. A reprint of the 1947 Popular Publications edition of this novel.
The Pulp Magazine Index, Fourth Series
, by Leonard A. Robbins. 567 p., 8.5 x 11”. ISBN 1-55742-241-9 cloth $80.
Red Twilight; World’s End: Two Classic Novels from
Argosy, by Harl Vincent and Victor Rousseau.
Starmont Facsimile Fiction
#13. vi+123 p. ISBN 1-55742-216-8 cloth $20.95; ISBN 1-55742-215-X paper $10.95.
Secret of the Earth Star and Others
, by Henry Kuttner, edited & introduced by Sheldon Jaffery.
Starmont Facsimile Fiction
#6. x+157 p. ISBN 1-55742-135-8 cloth $20.95; ISBN 1-55742-134-X paper $10.95. Contents: “Introduction,” by Jaffery; “Secret of the Earth Star”; “World Without Air”; “What Hath Me?”; “Dragon Moon”; “I, the Vampire”; “The Elixir of Invisibility”; “The Uncanny Power of Edwin Cobalt”; “Under Your Spell.”
Worlds Within Worlds: Four Classic
Argosy
Tales of Science Fiction
.
Starmont Facsimile Fiction
#12. viii+122 p. ISBN 1-55742-214-1 cloth $20.95; ISBN 1-55742-213-3 paper $10.95. No editor is credited. Contents: “Worlds Within Worlds,” by Philip M. Fisher Jr.; “Out of the Silence,” by Garret Smith; “Children of Tomorrow,” by Arthur Leo Zagat; “Colossus of the Radio,” by Leslie Ramón.
1992
Black Forbidden Things: Cryptical Secrets from the “Crypt of Cthulhu”
, edited by Robert M. Price.
Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism
, No. 44. iv+200 p. ISBN 1-55742-249-4 cloth $21.95; ISBN 1-55742-248-6 paper $11.95. Contents: “Introduction,” by Price; “Who Wrote ‘The Mound’?” by S. T. Joshi; “H.P. Lovecraft and
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
,” by S. T. Joshi; “The Sources for ‘From Beyond’,” by S. T. Joshi; “Tentacles in Dreamland: Cthulhu Mythos Elements in the Dunsanian Stories,” by Will Murray; “Self-Parody in Lovecraft’s Revisions,” by Will Murray; “Prehuman Language in Lovecraft,” by Will Murray; “H.P. Lovecraft’s
Fungi from Yuggoth
,” by David E. Schultz; “Lovecraft’s New York Exile,” by David E. Schultz; “E.R.B. and H.P.L.,” by William Fulwiler; “Randolph Carter, Warlord of Mars,” by Price; “The Pseudo-Intellectual in Weird Fiction,” by Price; “August Derleth: Myth-Maker,” by Price; “‘Lovecraftianity’ and the Pagan Revival,” by Price; “Cosmic Fear and the Fear of the Lord: Lovecraft’s Religious Vision,” by Price; “Chariots of the Old Ones?” by Robert M. Price and Charles Garofalo; “The
Necronomicon
: The Origin of a Spoof,” by Colin Wilson; “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” by William Lumley; “A Sacrifice to Science,” by Adolphe de Castro; “The Automatic Executioner,” by Adolphe de Castro; “The Tower from Yuggoth,” by Ramsey Campbell; “The Ringer of the Doorbell,” by Jim Cort; “The Slitherer from the Tomb,” by Lin Carter; “Limericks from Yuggoth,” by Lin Carter; “Mildew from Shaggai,” by Price; “Shards from Shaggai,” by Price; “Famous Last Words,” by Price; “Screwtape’s Letter to Cthulhu,” by Price; Mail-Call of Cthulhu.
A Casebook on The Stand
, edited by Tony Magistrale.
Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism
, No. 38. xii+210 p. ISBN 1-55742-251-6 cloth $26; ISBN 1-55742-250-8 paper $16. Contents: “Introduction,” by Magistrale; “‘Almost Better’: Surviving the Plague in Stephen King’s
The Stand
,” by Mary Pharr; “‘I Think the Government Stinks!’: Stephen King’s
Stand
on Politics,” by Douglas Keesey; “Stephen King and His Readers: A Dirty, Compelling Romance,” by Brian Kent; “The ‘Power of Blackness’ in
The Stand
,” by Leonard Cassuto; “Repaying Service with Pain: the Role of God in
The Stand
,” by Leonard Mustazza; “Free Will and Sexual Choice in
The Stand
,” by Magistrale; “Choice, Sacrifice, Destiny, and Nature in
The Stand
,” by Bernadette Lynn Bosky; “Dark Streets and Bright Dreams: Rationalism, Technology, and ‘Impossible Knowledge’ in Stephen King’s
The Stand
,” by Michael A. Morrison; “Dialogue within the Archetypal Community of
The Stand
,” by Ed Casebeer; “Beyond Armageddon: Stephen King’s
The Stand
and the Post Catastrophic World in Speculative Fiction,” by Steven Kagle; Works Cited; Index.
Discovering Classic Horror Fiction
I
, edited by Darrell Schweitzer.
Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism
, No. 27. vi+191 p. LC 89-11431. ISBN 1-55742-085-8 cloth $21.95; ISBN 1-55472-084-X paper $11.95. Contents: “Introduction,” by Schweitzer; “Arthur Machen: Philosophy and Fiction,” by S. T. Joshi; “Richard Middleton: Beauty, Sadness, and Terror,” by Schweitzer; “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson,” by Alan Warren; “On the Edge: The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare,” by Gary William Crawford; “Chambers and
The King in Yellow
,” by Lee Weinstein; “H. Russell Wakefield: The Man Who Believed in Ghosts,” by Ben P. Indick; “The Landscape of Sin: The Ghost Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu,” by Gary William Crawford; “Blood Brothers: The Supernatural Fiction of A. C., R. H., and E. F. Benson,” by Mike Ashley; “The Shadow over Derleth,” by Paul Spencer; “Oliver Onions: The Man at the Edge,” by Mike Ashley; “W. C. Morrow: Forgotten Master of Horror—First Phase,” by Sam Moskowitz; Contributors; Index.
Double Trouble: A Bibliographic Chronicle of Ace Mystery Doubles
, by Sheldon Jaffery.
Starmont Popular Culture Studies
, No. 11. xvi+150 p. LC 89-11447. ISBN 1-55742-119-6 cloth $22; ISBN 1-55742-118-8 paper $12. Title page reads: Starmont Reference Guide #12.
Fear to the World: Eleven Voices in a Chorus of Horror
, by Kevin E. Proulx.
Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism
, No. 35. x+243 p. ISBN 1-55742-174-9 cloth $30; ISBN 1-55742-173-0 paper $20. Interviews with eleven horror writers. Contents: Acknowledgements; Foreword; 1. Clive Barker; 2. Ramsey Campbell; 3. John Farris; 4. Joe R. Lansdale; 5. George R. R. Martin; 6. Richard Christian Matheson; 7. Steve Rasnic Tem; 8. J. N. Williamson; 9. F. Paul Wilson; 10. T. M. Wright; 11. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; Recommended Reading; Afterword; Index.
J. R. R. Tolkien
, by David & Carol D. Stevens.
Starmont Reader’s Guide
, 54. vi+178 p. ISBN 1-55742-238-9 cloth $19.95; ISBN 1-55742-237-0 paper $9.95. Most copies of this book were defective, reproducing page 8 on pages 9-10, and omitting the text that should have appeared on the latter. A handful of copies were corrected, but the bulk of the print run remained uncirculated. The book was reprinted facsimile in 1993 by The Borgo Press as Volume 56 of The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today. This is the scarcest of all the Starmont books.
Kurt Vonnegut
, by Donald E. Morse.
Starmont Reader’s Guide
, No. 61. iv+128 p. ISBN 1-55742-219-2 cloth $19.95; ISBN 1-55742-220-6 paper $9.95.
Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos: The Background of a Myth That Has Captured a Generation
, by Lin Carter.
Starmont Popular Culture Studies
, No. 10. xxii+198 p. ISBN 1-55742-253-2 cloth $22; ISBN 1-55742-252-4 paper $12. A facsimile reprint of the 1972 Ballantine Books edition.
Pulpmaster: The Theodore Roscoe Story
, by Audrey Parente.
Starmont Popular Culture Studies
, No. 13. xvi+173 p. ISBN 1-55742-170-6 cloth $21.95; ISBN 1-55742-169-2 paper $11.95.
William Gibson
, by Lance Olsen.
Starmont Reader’s Guide
, 58. vii+131 p. ISBN 1-55742-199-4 cloth $20; ISBN 1-55742-198-6 paper $11.
Miscellaneous Titles
In addition to the books listed above, Starmont also distributed and sold as part of its own list the titles published under the FAX Collector’s Editions imprint (the last book of which appeared in 1979), plus two other volumes previously published by Dikty:
The American Boys’ Book Series Bibliography, 1895-1935
, by Alan S. Dikty. Naperville, IL; West Linn, OR: BBC Publications, 1977. 167 p., 8.5 x 11”. LC 77-75300. ISBN 0-916732-65-7 cloth $22.95; ISBN 0-916732-64-9 paper $14.95 (the price charged in 1983). The ISBN numbers were assigned retrospectively; Starmont began listing the remainder of the print run in its catalogs in 1983.
Boys’ Book Collector, #1-13
, Alan S. Dikty, Editor, Ted Dikty, Publisher. 1983. ISBN 0-916732-66-5 cloth $19.95. A binding together of the thirteen issues of this periodical, which had been originally published between 1969-1973. Roughly 75 sets were bound in lots of 5-10 copies each.
Borgo Press Editions
The Starmont cloth editions were almost all rebound by The Borgo Press from the paper editions, employing the hardcover binders that Borgo used in Southern California. A few Starmont cloth editions were independently produced and bound in Eugene, Oregon, during the last years of its existence. Borgo Press also distributed the entire Starmont House and FAX Collector’s Editions list beginning in 1980, and rebound the books into its own cloth imprints, the title pages being labeled with the BP label. The Borgo editions usually carry the Borgo logo and imprint impressed on the top and bottom of each book’s spine. The paperbound versions of the Starmont editions of these books are always the true first editions.
Series Numbers
Starmont House assigned many series numbers to books that were never actually published. Some of these manuscripts will be issued by other publishers; others were never completed, or will fail to find a home elsewhere. The actual numbers used in the various Starmont series are as follows:
Contemporary Writers—1-2
(2 vols.)
Facsimile Fiction
—1-3, 6, 12-14 (7 vols.)
Hardcover Collection
—1-4 (4 vols.)
Popular Culture Studies—1-3, 6, 8-11, 13, 16
(10 vols.)
Popular Fiction—0-2, 4-5
(5 vols.)
Pulp and Dime Novel Studies—1-4
(4 vols.)
Reader’s Guides—1-16, 18-37, 39-40, 43-44, 47-50, 54, 58, 61
(47 vols.)
Reference Guides—1-5, 8-9, 18 [12-13
misassigned] (8 vols.)
Studies in Literary Criticism—1-4, 6, 8-14, 16, 22, 24-27, 30-33, 35-38, 44
(27 vols.)
BRIAN STABLEFORD’S WORLD IN AGONY (1995)
with
Brian Craig
Brian Stableford sold his first SF story while still at school, and three of his early novels—
The Blind Worm
,
To Challenge Chaos
, and
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
—are partly or wholly cannibalized from material written at about the same time. For some years he divided his time between the desultory pursuit of an academic career and his writing, swaying first one way and then the other as his fortunes shifted. Between 1969 and 1982 he wrote approximately thirty novels, most of them for Donald A. Wollheim, the SF editor at Ace and (from 1972) the publisher of DAW Books, his own imprint. His few attempts to break out of the mold which Wollheim preferred—series space opera—failed to make any significant headway; the intense psychological melodrama
Man in a Cage
, the light-hearted children’s fantasy
The Last Days of the Edge of the World
, and the time-hopping evolutionary fantasy
The Walking Shadow
disappeared almost immediately following initial publication.
In 1981, having obtained tenure in a teaching position at the University of Reading, the author decided to concentrate on nonfiction, but when his painstaking study of
Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1910
sold poorly, and his volume on
Eroticism in Supernatural Literature
had to be aborted after the U.S. distributor pulled out, he concluded that such work was ultimately self-defeating. In 1986 he began to write short stories in profusion, redeploying and refining speculations about the future of biotechnology which he had first extrapolated for use in the futurology text,
The Third Millennium
. The implanting of “hard science fiction” ideas into sarcastic and somewhat mannered narratives gave him for the first time a distinctive narrative voice. He also attempted to take up his earlier career where he had left off by extending one of his last DAW novels,
Journey to the Center
, into a trilogy, but DAW was no longer interested, and the trilogy (including a revised version of the first volume) only appeared in England. This was an unfortunate fate for what is by far the most stylish, extravagant, and action-packed of Stableford’s space operas, in which countless alien worlds are conveniently packed into a giant, multi-layered artifact endangered by the breakdown of the systems controlling its power source.
In 1987 Britain was at the height of an economic boom and British publishing was rapidly expanding. Stableford obtained a commission from Simon and Schuster’s fledgling U.K. offshoot to produce
The Empire of Fear
, an alternative history novel in which seventeenth-century Europe is ruled by an aristocracy of “vampires.” The creatures’ hegemony is threatened and eventually overturned by the emergence of new investigative instruments and the scientific method, which reveal that their origins and powers are natural rather than supernatural. The quest for an explanation of vampirism takes the characters deep into the heart of Africa. There they discover a biological agent which confers longevity and immunity to pain on those who nourish it with the blood of their fellow men, and find that it has been integrated into tribal societies in a fashion which contrasts strongly with its amalgamation into western culture.
The Empire of Fear
is perhaps the most memorable of Stableford’s works, but his attempts to answer Simon and Schuster’s demands for more of the same were less successful. A project similar in spirit— in that it adopted a similar revisionist approach to various other staples of horror fiction—was recast at the publisher’s request into a trilogy begun with
The Werewolves of London
, but was then interrupted in the hopes of cashing in on the sudden popularity of vampire fiction.
Young Blood
is as different from
The Empire of Fear
as the author could contrive: a contemporary thriller in which a neurotic young woman’s love affair with a vampire might or might not be the hallucinatory result of a psychotropic virus which has escaped from the laboratory where her boyfriend works. The novel’s conclusion, which reinterprets everything that has gone before in a surprising and intellectually ambitious fashion, is startlingly original. The trilogy whose production was interrupted by this intrusion ended far less happily, its belated third volume,
The Carnival of Destruction
, appearing in Britain in paperback form some three years after
The Angel of Pain
. The loss of creative impetus is evident in the climax of
Carnival
, which is both awkward and unclear when it should have provided some better resolution to the series.
Stableford has tried for some years to extend his adventures in speculative biotechnology into novel form, but without much commercial success. The novel version of the flirtatiously decadent futuristic murder mystery,
Les Fleurs du Mal
, was rejected by his agent on the grounds that it was too eccentric and tedious; in the end the author salvaged the material by cutting it to novella length. When it sold in that version, he quickly recast several other projects in a similar mold, producing a number of works written in a much terser style than before, but still retaining an imaginative sweep unusual in novellas of that length. For example, “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires” is a parallel text to H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, in which a select party of Victorians—including Oscar Wilde, one of whose avatars is the paradoxical hero of “Les Fleurs du Mal”—passes judgment on a time traveler’s far-ranging account of the species which inherits the earth after the self-destruction of mankind. “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death” describes the career of a man born into a world where no one dies of disease or old age. His compilation of a definitive history of death only uses up a tiny fraction of his prospective lifespan, but nevertheless achieves a glorious triumph over the creeping menace of
ennui
.
The novella version of “Les Fleurs du Mal” brought Stableford his first Hugo nomination, but it remains to be seen whether he can discover any market space in which to continue his ironic celebrations of the potential of biotechnology to transform the quality of human life and the nature of human society. Although his most pedestrian action-adventure novels exhibit a certain flair for exotic imagery, Stableford’s sense of humor is sufficiently unorthodox to ensure that he never will appeal to a wide audience; and even those who have acquired a taste for his fictions sometimes find his odysseys in
bizarrerie
difficult to follow to their conscientiously perverse conclusions. Laughing like hell, the author seems to be saying, is the only recourse left to a species whose perversity has created a laughable hell on Earth.